What do you shoot at

We shoot mostly cocktail picks, dressmaker's pins and paintballs. We used to try and find the smallest possible cocktail picks, but now instead use any size we can get cheap, and we 'whittle' the big ones down. Some can take 5-6 shots before completely disappearing! Then we shoot the stick down in maybe 1/2" increments. Neat thing is that you can get holiday themed cocktail picks to keep your weekly airgun group shoots interesting.
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Paintball targets can be 'seasonal' as well. Just this week on the day of our shoot it was 'National Pancake Day'. We use the smaller .50 call paintballs. Before and after views of our target:

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With glue and toothpicks (and some time) you can make biodegradable targets pretty much as small as you like.
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Wish I was THAT good. Goals…
 
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I was at a Black Powder cartridge shoot one time where they had a dimond 200 yds offhand. now thats a tuff target! it was probably 12 inches top to bottom. ther isnt much to the center of a dimond shape. make small one and hang from a sting at whatever distance you choose and it will be challenging! Especially in the ND wind.
 
I forgot.

Also very much like to shoot straws and branches / flowers in the grass, for a reasonable chance of a hit within 50 M, but i have stretched it out now and then, but then it get orders of magnitude harder to pull off.
At 100 + yards, you would want 1/2 inch branches at least, and then they have to be dry to break them in one shot, a fresh branch will need many hits with a .177.
But up close something like the size of the caliber you shoot is fine.

Moist aggravating shooting not directly backed stuff is, you often do not see where you miss, so in those cases i like to have something close by i can take a shot at now and then to see where i am at.

Previous outing i was shooting at a lump of dirt way back there, and after that was levelled just two pieces of old branches lying on the ground a foot further away.

A man can only shoot paper for so long.

This summer i also whacked a blackbird when i was testing 20 grain in my rifle, at 60-65 M distance the bird did a forward somersault and then nothing.
Generally though i dont really shoot at birds, i dont think we have any here that is / would be classified as pests, but pretty sure many a farmer here are pissed about starlings ASO.
 
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I print these targets out on 4x6" thermal shipping labels and then stick them on the various empty Amazon and other shipping boxes received during the week. I sit those on the ground in front of small logs set at 20, 30, and 40 yds in the yard. Slap a new target label over the old one a few times after it's shot up. Once the boxes are shot full of holes or after they get soaked in the rain, they just get tossed in the recycling. Completely free (even the labels with a biz shipping account) and zero maintenance. Don't even need to buy ink for the printer since it's thermal paper. Been doing it this way for years. At 50 yds I have a small steel target gallery with various flippers and spinners.

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Lately I've been shooting a lot of padlocks. We cut the old ones off of equipment and replace them with new ones where I work, so I've got dozens of these old and very solid padlocks. I just hang them on strings and when they're hit it puts them in motion.

A couple months ago I was shooting a lot of plums. They make a very satisfying splat when you hit them dead on and shatter the pits. Cherries make good targets as well. I don't like to waste food, but when these are in season we have so many that most go to waste anyway.

Other good targets that I've used include aspirin tablets and pennies. The aspirins are cheap and explode in a cloud of dust when hit. Drill a hole in the pennies and hang them from a string. You could use a washer too, but pennies are cheaper and less useful.

I've also just used any old scrap of metal in the past. Scraps of copper or galvanized pipe and fittings can be hung on strings and make an audible clang when hit.

I also shoot a lot of cardboard boxes. I'll either mark a small dot on them with a sharpie or I'll punch a hole in them and stick a dandelion head through it. The dandelion heads really stand out against the cardboard and they're just more fun to shoot than a dot of ink.
 
I'm in the ink dot phase myself. My basement range is laughable, maybe 7 yards. I just try to make the best of it. I took an old tree bucket and filled it with rubber mulch and jeans. Works well! Top left was with my Cometa 400 .22 with FX 15.89s. And a scope, but at 3x. It loves those pellets!
Top right was Benjamin Fortitude with blurry 4x scope and 10 rounds of HN Crow Mag.

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Just picked these up, going to go play on Monday. Been punching paper for the last several years, when I was waiting on my Zeus to refill a few weeks ago I decided to shoot like I did as a teen just to take a break so I threw out 3 soda cans and did some homemade reaction shooting. The cans didn’t last long getting knocked around with my Leshy 2 and GK1 so these are the soda can replacements

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I recently acquired some of those as well. Looking forward to giving them a try.
 
I shoot a lot of targets at 30-40-and 50 yards, Depends on the wind, (west Texas) I also shoot a lot of little dime size caps as pictured, The little red caps come off insulin syringes,
I will also pick up old brass and shoot, Them things zing sometimes, Little plastic Amy men from the dollar store, 100 come in a bag cheap,, Any kind of pill bottle filled with water, sand, cloth, just about anything, Used shot gun shells, shoot them at the very top and I have had them fly 30 feet in the air, I give up shooting marbles to much glass on the ground
anything the wife is about to toss and is hard plastic that I can stick a target on, Trained the wife to ask you want this to shoot, LOL. Old keys hung on a old 2x4 make crazy bends
I can't shoot any candy or cereal on my target range , My horse goes crazy and destroys my shooting range , Tacks are fun but a problem with them on the ground, Any nut , NO NO not you!!! The little texas round pecan that is not worth cracking to eat is a blast , They explode, seem the birds get them before the horse ,
My 50 yard backstop is railroad ties its the best, 40 yards is thin metal 3x4 with rubber mat and cardboard clipped on for paper targets to stick to, I replace cardboard often ,
30 yards are three big 4 foot x 2 food homemade bird, squirrel , and varmint feeders , With 50 LBS of grain put out 24/7 to feed my pet squirrels song birds and the pest that I shoot.
I could post pictures of all this crap,. oops I mean good stuff , If you really want to see it,, I should have titled this 20 years of air gun shooting , Its more like 48 years but 20 years hard core in the sport and all that stuff,,,,LOL
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I like pictures
 
Mostly random paper targets, and woodpeckers when they're destroying my siding.
A house had some of that foam trim molding around the top the woodpeckers made a deep nest inside it they bought some kind of woodpecker repelling paint $$ after fixing the hole and the next day the hole was back.:rolleyes:
 
Has anyone experimented with odd shape targets?

Most of the things we shoot at are generally circular. At least easy to judge center mass. They are good aiming points.

Others are a lot harder to hit.

The toy dinosaurs are a great example. A triceratops is easy to hit. He's a fat dot. A tyrannosaurus is hard to hit. He's a triangle. Even if the T Rex is much bigger.

A shotgun shell laying horizontally or standing is easy to hit. Laying at an angle much more difficult.

Color is a big deal too. I hate bright yellow 20 ga. shells. I can hit .410 at 25 yards one after the other. Put a yellow 20 GA out there and watch me spend 50 cents trying to hit it. Spray it flat black and you can't miss it.

Instead of round sticker dots I cut square ones in half diagonally. Lots of colors oriented differently. It was very difficult to get a good pattern aiming at any of them. And aggravating as hell when shot at individually.

This thread is great reading…

I gotta ask you Bedrock Bob, are you an analyst or engineer?

When you described how it was easier to shoot a triceratops than a T-Rex, I had to know what you do, lol.

-Ed